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[Mephansteras]

So, me and a few of my friends have been talking about creating a facebook game. They seem pretty easy to set up and can make good money. The goal being something that I can do that'll let me go off and make real games.

So, my question for people is: How many of you actually play facebook games? And what kinds of things are you looking for? I'm not planning on a rip-off of farmville or mafia wars or anything. I have some ideas for more unique games.

So, those of you that do play them, what would make you play my game instead of the others? What would make you skip over it without really bothering to give it more than a cursory overview?

[ein]

I don't do anything on Facebook, but what are some of your ideas?

[Retro]

I don't play Facebook games either, but I find that the most annoying part of them is when messages show up on the player's profile being like "John has lost a tooth! Grab your dental tools and help him find it!" I've always thought it makes you look silly. So avoiding that if possible would be nice.

[Flaming Dorf]

The shameless advertising of Facebook games are part of the reason they work. The only way to get a decent amount of money with a Facebook application is with self-ads that go slinging around to everybody's news feeds. That said, here are some demographic statistics that could come in handy.

[Heavy Flak]

I can't believe I'm admitting to this, but yes, I occasionally play games on Facebook.  My reasoning?

Hi, I'm Heavy Flak, and I'm an achievement whore.

There is some part of me that feels compelled to collect things.  It doesn't matter what they are, really, as long as you dress it up like it should be "fun", put a check list with how close you are to the end, and give a lame prize when it's done, I'm content.  A lot of my friends are this way, too.

I'm not sure what you have in mind, and I'll admit as much of a collector as I am I've never PAID for any of that stuff -- but if you're looking for addictiveness and revenue, you might want to try adding in some kind of... I don't know... element of collecting, I guess.  A way to brag, outside of a numerical level.

[MrWiggles]

I think it needs to be stressed that /some/ facebook games make money. Most don't.
I dont play any facebook games beside sudoku sometimes. I play it on facebook as its a mighty fine mostly ad free version.

I dont lik'em. It just promotes more and mroe this false sentiments that I hate of facebook.
In the Dev pages for facebook apps there is a collection of interviews about successful app devvers asking what makes a good app and what design elements you should keep in mind. Kinda of lengthy, but well written.

[Muz]

Dude, you just missed out on the Facebook gold rush. Gold's gonna run out very soon, especially since Facebook is working on making them less annoying and all.

Yeah, Facebook games are built on top of addiction. None of them are actually fun, they're just designed to be really addictive AND to show of your achievements to your friends. One of the ideas I loved was Family Feud. It's a little like an arcade machine. You get like only one or two games every day. If you paid for it, you'd get like 8 more games. If you invite a friend, you and they get half a free game. It's a really fun system and doesn't "force" you to invite friends like most of the other ones.

Also I've got a really good idea for a Facebook game people would love. Not sure if you want to discuss the idea in private, or I could just post it here if you don't want to exploit it

[cganya]

i play the odd face book game, currently enjoying "my tribe". We might need to know more about the ideas you have before we can shoot specific ideas at you but the current equation for these games is that they take time and lots of it. spending money either makes it take less time or allows you to be way more efficient with the same amount of time.

examples: farmville, mafia wars, hero wars, my tribe, cafe world

another thing that "makes cash" in these games is cash only items. you can buy plenty of things with in game money but some/many things are cash only. They might be purely aesthetic or give some nice big bonus.

examples: farmville, gunbound (not facebook but notorious for this)

thirdly, and I really think this goes without saying, facebook games have values and stats that you use to compare yourself with others. why have a game on a social network if it doesn't keep track of all your work and displays it for you in some way? This is why in most of these games you can "visit" your friends.

some things I would like to see:
- more incentive to work together without being limiting*
- A way to (slowly) gain "cash" points (not in game money)**
- rewarded for playing, not punished for "not playing"***

some things I would hate to see:
- PvP not optional****
- cash required to continue at some point*****
- cash only items/things, at least make them really expensive for non paying customers
- you need X number of friends to...

*: in Farmville you can visit other people's farms which is all fine and dandy. but what can you do? fertilize a few of their plants and do something with their chicken coop last i heard. you cant save their ready to wilt crops or help them harvest anything. why don't they allow people to be helpful?

**: my tribe, mafia wars, hero wars and I think farmville do this. you can buy like 5000 game cash for $10 and you can also get 100 in game cash when you level up. most of the sweet stuff costs enough in game cash that getting it for free takes a lot of effort (but at least you can!)

***: in farmville your crops wilt, in cafe world your food goes bad, in my tribe if you leave for long enough, your oldest tribe's person dies of old age and in egg breaker your hammers expire. these are all great hooks to keep people playing but they are not fun. rather its more fun to reward the player for being there and putting time into the game; in my tribe certain items appear on a rather scheduled basis which you can collect if you go looking for it. the game lets you know when they will appear but they wont if your not playing the game. this is actually the only way to get most of the items in my tribe.

****: I HATE THIS. maybe it fits the theme of the game well, maybe that's what your game is about and i should just not play it but... getting ganged up on by someone with 235 friends over and over, not being able to do anything because i never have any resources or because i don't have enough friends. it just isn't fun. PvP has the potential to be a lot of fun (just look at EVE online or pretty much any FPS with online play). mafia wars did this. I quit playing because any time i made any money it was instantly gone. people on facebook gang up big time and it just isn't fun.

*****: "and now I have built everything that doesn't require my pocket money. There is more content that i could enjoy but i would have to pay for it. it probably isn't much different from what i have already done so i wont buy into it." This was pretty much my problem with runescape. runescape had interesting and amusing quests, interesting areas to explore and treasures to find. the crafting system was addictive and enjoyable and took real dedication to get far in. but after a bit of exploring you come to a great wall with a gate in it and on the gate it says "pay us money and you can enjoy the other side of this gate!". Also, as a hard working crafter, I was quite pissed when I couldn't craft half the things available to me because i wasn't a paying subscriber. to top it off, and this made me quit, the new stuff was only for subscribers, nothing for the rest of us.

sorry for the length of the post. I would really love to read about what kind of game your thinking of ^.^

[Mephansteras]

Well, the idea I'm thinking of going with for my initial game is a pretty simple on. Basically all of the players are Lords who send out their Knights and various troops to battle for glory. The more glory you have, the higher your standings. There will be different troop types, upgrades you can get for both your troops and castle, improved titles and estates, and so on. The friends aspect is going to come in with Coalition Battles, where you can send one of your Knights and their forces to join a coalition and do battle as a group. The Coalitions will only fight one another and maybe some computer controlled barbarian hordes or something. Otherwise it's always Knight-Knight, so you don't have to worry about being ganged up on too much.

The achievement idea is a good one. Should be easy enough to add in a bunch of those.

I like the helper idea as well. Maybe if your friend is being attacked but doesn't have any troops left to defend the game can send messages to your friends that play requesting aid, and you can then send some of your troops to go lift the Siege. Which would probably be a nice glory boost.

Since my target paying market is the more competitive set who'll want to be on top of the standings I won't have anything that can't be done without spending a lot of time playing. You just won't be able to beat the people who are all near the top of the standings if you're not spending money. Which is fine, since they'll all be fighting each other anyway since you don't get much glory for fighting people you can easily beat. And I'm planning on adding in some mechanic to allow you to occasionally get Influence (rather then in-game gold) to do stuff with.

[alfie275]

Tip if you want it to stand out: Unity.

It is a system that lets you play 3D games in your browser, see velociraptor safari to see what I mean.

[Flaming Dorf]

I support the recommendation for Unity, it is surprisingly easy to use for such great results.

[Mephansteras]

I'll have to keep that in mind. I probably won't use it for the initial game, which is going to be very simple graphics-wise. Mostly card-like items with really good artwork on them. I want something simple for the initial project so we can get all the kinks worked out of getting a game up and running before we do anything really complicated on the game-side itself. But that system looks really promising for some other ideas I have.

[alfie275]

Should make DF on facebook, stream it from a server or something.

[ein]

Maybe a toned-down graphical version of DF.

[Blacken]

I suupport the recommendation for Unity, it is surprisingly easy to use for such great results.

Unity's awesome, but hooking it into a Facebook game is going to eat a metric crapload of bandwidth and turn most cheaper servers into a smoking pile of rubble via data transfer.

The latter is true of games of most kinds, including browser-based games. I hope you have a database guru and a system administrator you can ply with beer. You will need both.